News

The way it jump starts the government-tab business at good hotels. Your climate or mine may or may not be changing, but the hotel’s guests climate will improve a notch. 😉 Anyway, from New Scientist: The specific role of the climate shift in these events is unclear, but it would have changed what foods were available. Carbon isotope data from fossil hominid tooth enamel show that Paranthropus‘s diet was mostly derived from grasses, while the doomed Australopithecus almost exclusively ate plants that weren’t so well adapted to hot temperatures. Early Homo species seem to have eaten a mixture of grasses and non-grasses. Whenever one hears that the “specific role of [insert item] is unclear” and that it “would have” this Read More ›

Discussed as a design but believed, by dogma, not to be a design. From the Atlantic: Genomes are so regularly represented as strings of letters-As, Gs, Cs, and Ts-that it’s easy to forget that they aren’t just abstract collections of data. They exist in three dimensions. They are made of molecules. They are physical objects that take up space-a lot of space. Consider that the human genome is longer than the average human. It consists of around two meters of DNA, which must somehow fit into cells, whose nuclei are about 200,000 times narrower. So it folds. And it folds in such a way that any given stretch can be easily unfolded, so the genes within it can be read Read More ›

Entirely at random, or so the theory runs… From ScienceDaily: While study has long been conducted on vertebrates with sight-sensory systems involving a lens, retina and nervous system, new research reported by the University of Cincinnati and supported by the National Science Foundation is the first to examine how the complex eye system of an invertebrate – the Sunburst Diving Beetle – coordinates the development of its components. Despite the complexity of their eyes, including a bifocal lens, extremely rapid eye growth of the Sunburst Diving Beetle occurs during the transitions between larval stages. In addition, they temporarily go blind as the eye is quickly redeveloped. The findings by Shannon Werner, a recent University of Cincinnati master’s degree graduate in Read More ›

From New York Times: Stonehenge has captivated generation after generation. Archaeologists have over the years cataloged the rocks, divined meaning from their placement — lined up for midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset — and studied animal and human bones buried there. They have also long known about the other monuments — burial chambers, a 130-foot-tall mound of chalk known as Silbury Hill and many other circular structures. An aerial survey in 1925 revealed circles of timbers, now called Woodhenge, two miles from Stonehenge. … After the end of the grand construction phase of Stonehenge, around 2400 B.C., the monument was altered, but the era of megamonument building was over. “That’s basically when their world changed,” Dr. Parker Pearson said. New Read More ›

Remember anthropologist Jonathan Marks? Author of the recent Tales of the Ex-Apes, he took issue with evolutionary psychology in an op-ed recently, at some “Darwin the future” site, where he said “And finally, I can’t shake the feeling that the methodologies I have encountered in evolutionary psychology would not meet the standards of any other science.” No, of course not. Darwinism is only science when it produces results Darwin followers can use. Most of the time, it’s just the racket they enforce on Science Street. It’s becoming entertaining to watch who, helplessly, just pays up. Usually, the toffs with taxpayers’ money to waste. Anyway, anthropologist Barbara J. King opines, That term – ex-apes – get emphasized in the book a Read More ›

Here’s the abstract: To unveil the still-elusive nature of metazoan replication origins, we identified them genome-wide and at unprecedented high-resolution in mouse ES cells. This allowed initiation sites (IS) and initiation zones (IZ) to be differentiated. We then characterized their genetic signatures and organization and integrated these data with 43 chromatin marks and factors. Our results reveal that replication origins can be grouped into three main classes with distinct organization, chromatin environment, and sequence motifs. Class 1 contains relatively isolated, low-efficiency origins that are poor in epigenetic marks and are enriched in an asymmetric AC repeat at the initiation site. Late origins are mainly found in this class. Class 2 origins are particularly rich in enhancer elements. Class 3 origins Read More ›

That doesn’t mean we will get somewhere; it means we could possibly get somewhere. From the Atlantic, on an OOL meeting in Japan: “To kick off the meeting, I’m going to do the only thing I can reasonably do, which is ask the dumbest scientific questions I can think of: Did life originate more than once 4 billion years ago? Do we know for sure that origins of life events aren’t happening today, on the Earth? If life’s origin was a process that took tens of millions of years, how can we hope to repeat that process in an experiment? And what do we even mean when we say that something is “alive”? Not only are these all good questions, Read More ›

  Biochemist Michael Denton has a new book in the works, Evolution: Still a Theory in Crisis. His 1985 book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis first brought before a general public the reasons Darwinism might not be the single greatest idea anyone ever had, which of course earned the agnostic biochemist (who did not doubt that evolution occurs) a mass of abuse from tenured Darwin drones and their then-exploding troll nursery. No surprise that; anyone who is focused on hegemony is not focused on evidence. In the thirty years that followed, masses of evidence supporting Denton’s doubt began to accumulate, and the trolls’ job has been to beat it back into the shadows. We can listen to some of them Read More ›

From New Scientist: Sometimes evolution just doesn’t have a choice. Reptiles have evolved to resist toad poisons four separate times, and each time they have made precisely the same biochemical changes to do it. What’s more, an even wider range of animals show similar adaptations in response to these toxins, giving us by far the most extensive illustration of so-called convergent evolution to date. “so-called” convergent evolution? Yup. That’s what it is called. Gotta problem with that? This striking convergence on a few evolutionary outcomes probably occurs because sodium channels play such a critical role in cells. “There are very few options for a gene to modify itself to develop resistance without impairing function,” says Casewell. “It suggests that in Read More ›

They don’t get it, but what else is new? From Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek, “Why Physics is Beautiful”: The beauty of physical law is too impressive to be accidental. It has led people throughout history to believe that some tasteful higher being created us, and that we inhabit a consciously designed world, like our notional Super Mario. But this is an extravagant hypothesis, which goes far beyond the facts it is meant to explain. Before adopting it, we should explore more economical alternatives. The answer likely lies within us. Beautiful things are those in which we find pleasure and seek out. They are, in neurobiological terms, things that stimulate our reward system. That explains why parents tend to find their Read More ›

Michael Egnor, here, at Evolution News & Views: Regardless of the strengths and weaknesses of the evolutionary argument that humans are descended from apes, the differences between humans and apes are so profound as to render the view that humans are apes abject nonsense. It is important to understand the fundamental difference between humans and nonhuman animals. Nonhuman animals such as apes have material mental powers. By material I mean powers that are instantiated in the brain and wholly depend upon matter for their operation. These powers include sensation, perception, imagination (the ability to form mental images), memory (of perceptions and images), and appetite. Nonhuman animals have a mental capacity to perceive and respond to particulars, which are specific material Read More ›

Further to johnnyb’s “Intelligent Design Creationism” as a Label”: The word salad “cdesign proponentsists” was cited as evidence of something  in comments 4 and 40. For readers confused by “cdesign proponentsists’” here’s the widely circulated story from an atheist blog at Patheos: Pandas, it turns out, went through several editions: in its first (1983) edition, it was titled Creation Biology, then renamed in 1986 to Biology and Creation, then renamed again in 1987 to Biology and Origins, finally becoming Of Pandas and People. The plaintiffs subpoenaed the book’s publisher, the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, to obtain these prior drafts, and found something amazing. The earlier drafts, as you might expect from the titles, made repeated references to creationism. But Read More ›

From the University of Edinburgh: Until now, the oldest evidence of complex animals – which succeeded more primitive creatures that often resembled sponges or coral – came from the Cambrian Period, which began around 541 million years ago. Scientists had long suspected that complex animals had existed before then but, until now, they had no proof. … Genetic family tree data suggested that complex animals – known as bilaterians – evolved prior to the Cambrian Period. The finding suggests that bilaterians may have lived as early as 550 million years ago, during the late Ediacaran Period. … The team studied fossils of an extinct marine animal – known as Namacalathus hermanastes – which was widespread during the Ediacaran Period. The Read More ›

Some have. And they are said to “turn paleontology on its head.” F. protensa is 520 mya or so. (They had brains back then?) From Eurekalert: Science has long dictated that brains don’t fossilize, so when Nicholas Strausfeld co-authored the first ever report of a fossilized brain in a 2012 edition of Nature, it was met with “a lot of flack.” … His latest paper in Current Biology addresses these doubts head-on, with definitive evidence that, indeed, brains do fossilize. … The only way to become fossilized is, first, to get rapidly buried. Hungry scavengers can’t eat a carcass if it’s buried, and as long as the water is anoxic enough – that is, lacking in oxygen – a buried Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A team from USC found the Eotiaris guadalupensis in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution from the Glass Mountains of west Texas, where it had been buried in a rock formation that dates back to 268.8 million years at its youngest.”This fossil pushes the evolution of this type of sea urchin from the Wuchiapingian age all the way back to the Roadian age,” said David Bottjer, professor at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and senior author of a paper announcing the find that appeared in Nature Scientific Reports on October 21. … Eotiaris guadalupensis is a cidaroid, one of the two main types of sea urchins found in today’s oceans. The other group, the Read More ›